Varduun is a land cursed twice. Once by fire, when Drael fell and split the earth, vomiting up vents, ash rivers, and poisoned plains. Again by its folk, for the hyenas claimed the land and made it theirs.
It is a land of cracked savannah, fever-swamps, scorched plains, and wasted rivers. Disease prowls through its camps as easily as raiders do. Unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and deaths in childbirth are common; the alleys swarm with half-starved pups and abandoned ferals. Life here is cheap, short, and cruel—and the hyenas laugh at the cruelty not because it is funny, but because it is all they know.
The Hyenalands are no kingdom, no empire. They are a trinity of strongholds and hordes—Gorzanth, Zarnack, and Krothuum—locked in endless rivalry. Only when all three are threatened at once do they bare their teeth outward, and then the savannah burns.
And always, on the horizon, the whisper of a fourth city—Old Kartong, not theirs, not of Varduun, but a ruin that mocks them all.
In almost complete contrast to the hyena wastes of the Zhurian East stand the Realms of the Doglands — a loose constellation of citadels and town-states nestled between the ridges of Izhura and the guarded frontiers of the Lions’ territorial dominions.
Where the hyena tribes thrive on terror, filth, and frenzy, the folk of the Doglands labor toward the illusion — and perhaps the first true experiment — of civilization. Their walls are high, their gates fortified, their plazas swept and sunlit. Within, sandstone towers rise over clay-tiled streets; bazaars spill with spice, silver, and textiles traded freely among breeds once enslaved.
The population itself is a breed-born refuge of runaways and freed thralls, their collective memory steeped in the hunger for autonomy. Every law in their realm speaks to the preservation of the self — and the punishment of those who would erase it. Execution and treason are the two pillars upon which their justice rests, and mercy is measured not in pity, but in restraint from cruelty.
Yet for all their civility, they remain a young and precarious nation. The Dogfolk abhor conscription, reject state labor drafts, and refuse to bind service to punishment. Their armies are few, their militia undisciplined, and their reliance on coin and contract makes them slow to rally. They are merchants before soldiers, architects before conquerors, and in that inversion lies both their nobility and their doom.
Still, their hatred of both Jackals & hyenas runs hotter than any forge in Vandyrus. No treaty, no creed, no trade route is ever permitted to cross the filth of those carrion plains. To the Dogfolk, coexistence with Wolves is a cautious truce; with Horses, a mutual respect. But with Hyenas — only eternal war, declared in silence, and fought in every child’s bedtime story.
For mistakes, even noble ones, do not require frequency to accumulate ruin. And the Lions across the western sea, in their cruel provinces of Gamandor, have long delighted in watching fledgling nations stumble — savoring, with almost culinary patience, the pleasure of playing with their food.
Ajeros exists because it must, not because it should. It is a city pressed into service by geography and history alike, a hard knot of stone and wet iron driven into the southern edge of Yir’s long shadow. Though counted among the holdings of Izhura, it is an outland city in every meaningful sense: distant, inconvenient, and perpetually half-forgotten by those who live in safer latitudes.
The routes that reach it do so grudgingly, slipping through vine-choked corridors and old jungle descents that once flowed south from Yir in elder ages, when the land was wilder and the borders less certain. Even now, those jungles have not fully released their claim. They cling. They creep. They remember.
The city itself is civilized only by constant effort. Stone streets exist, but they are never fully dry. Walls stand, but they are webbed with roots and lichen, their mortar forever tested by moisture and slow green pressure. Rain is not an event here; it is a condition. It seeps into roofs, beads along beams, and darkens cloth until even the poorest can tell by touch alone whether a garment has ever truly dried.
Homes are built with this knowledge carved into them. Windows are screened not for comfort but survival, their metal meshes fine enough to bar the bird-sized mosquitos that rise from the low green reaches at dusk, drawn by heat, breath, and blood. To leave a window unguarded is not negligence but folly, and folly does not live long in Ajeros.
Yet for all this, Ajeros is not lawless. Its merchants are Izhuran by custom and reputation, their measures honest, their contracts respected even by those who grumble at the city’s isolation. Trade here is practical rather than ambitious. Goods are moved because they must be, not because fortunes will be made.
The guards are much the same—strong, disciplined, and unromantic about their duty. They do not posture as heroes. They stand watch because the watch must be stood, and because everyone in Ajeros understands what happens when it is not.
For the truth, known to every stonecutter and shopkeeper, is that Ajeros is not merely a city. It is a warning bell. It is the northernmost civilized finger extended toward Yir, and the first knuckle that will be broken if something terrible decides to move south.
The badlands above do not loom merely in distance but in intent, a region whose ferocity eclipses Ajeros not just in violence, but in scale, in logistics, in the simple capacity to endure and deliver ruin. Ajeros knows this. There is no delusion here of matching Yir blow for blow, nor of holding against a true descent. Its purpose is earlier and bleaker: to see first, to bleed first, and to send word while there is still time for others to prepare.
This awareness shapes the city’s character more than any charter or banner. Ajeros does not indulge in grand monuments or idle excess. Beauty exists here, but it is the beauty of persistence—of lantern light reflected on wet stone, of vines cut back each morning only to be cut again the next, of rooftops patched so many times they resemble quilts of iron and tar.
Izhura stands as a battered but enduring wedge of territory carved out of the chaos and competition that defines central Zhuru. Unlike the realms that rise and fall with seasonal tides or the city-states that vanish into mud and memory, Izhura endures, neither the most powerful nor the most desperate, but a constant presence where so many others have flickered out.
On a map, the realm is a long, crooked lance of grassland and border, reaching north toward the thick, haunted forests of Yir, sloping south until it meets the restless surf of the Craterian Sea.
It is surrounded on all sides by realms that are either richer, wilder, or more dangerous—Yir’s uplands and poison woods to the north, the mires and uncertain loyalties of Gunran to the east, the crowded guild-dominated coast of Elder Ruselon to the south, and the rough dog-lands of Bantos to the west. The horse folk of Izhura have survived not by outshining their neighbors, but by learning the virtues of patience, adaptation, and, when the time comes, sudden, blinding action.
For outsiders, Izhura often blurs into a single patch of green, a corridor between more exotic realms. But for those who live on its soil, the land is divided into three major territories, each shaped by history, climate, and proximity to other powers: Uyarin, Vessara, and Elleas.
These divisions are not just political—they are environmental, cultural, and psychological, with boundaries that run deeper than any border stone or old decree. The grassland spine that links them is both a blessing and a curse. It binds the realm together, but it also exposes it: armies, caravans, raiders, and rumor all travel the same broad corridors.
DANGER: Yir is virtually unexplored & almost completely unmapped in any reliable way. The known “Cities” lie in crumbling vine- haunted ruins that haven’t been reached by anyone sane or returned in generations.
Ghu
Anar
Rakka
Yir is a kingdom of vapor perched high above the world. Cold rainforests sprawl across shattered uplands where the land itself rises in broken cliffs, thousands of feet above the grasslands below. Mazes of mangroves knot with drowned forests, and black pools yawn like mouths between their roots. Paths vanish overnight, swallowed by shifting waters, and the cliffs themselves bleed waterfalls that vanish into the mists beneath. To descend from Yir is near suicide. The plateau was not meant for escape, only endurance.
The folk of Yir are scattered and sparse. Small mammals dart through the undergrowth, preyed upon by tall, sharp-beaked bird clans who prowl with spear and arrow. Between them stalk the lizard-folk, chameleon-skinned and silent, hunters who thrive in ambush and camouflage. None bend to any empire, and all live uneasily amid ruins far older than themselves.
Everywhere in Yir rise the shattered remains of temples—stone long claimed by moss and rot. Their carvings are worn, their rites forgotten, but still the swampfolk whisper of the beings once worshipped there. The old priests promised change, spoke of transformation as a gift. Yet the stories linger of shapes half-formed, of folk who shed their skins endlessly, never complete, never at peace. In the black pools, the locals say, something still waits.
Conflict festers even in isolation. The Bird–Civit Wars rage, tall hunters clashing against nimble arboreal fighters in ambush and reprisal. In the drowned forests, the Arboreal Kingdoms feud endlessly, their skirmishes as frequent as the storms.
For Yir is a land that breeds no peace; its folk are too busy surviving one another, too busy fearing the return of whatever once ruled here.
